1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for generating a secret key for secure communication between terminals by using a characteristic of a radio channel of a wireless communication network.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, in wireless communication, two terminals share an identical secret key to perform secure communication for transmitting and receiving secret messages. A public key cryptography scheme may be used so that the two terminals may share the same secret key. The public key cryptography requires a key management infrastructure, and it may be available only when computing power of the terminal attempting to hack the secret message is limited.
However, a distributed wireless communication system does not have such infrastructure. In addition, it is difficult to apply the conventional public key cryptography scheme that restricts the computing power of the terminal attempting to wiretrap the secured message to the distributed wireless communication system.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.